ICANN ‘ trying to modernize’
p2pnet.net News:- Critics of ICANN (Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers) say it’s slow in making decisions and that it’s too close to the US government.
But ICANN ceo Paul Twomey says the organization is trying to modernize and allow participation from other countries and that it’s “looking at opening regional offices, internationalizing, hoping to address these issues”.
Quoted in an Associated Press story here, Twomey said the US government has taken a hands-off approach and that ICANN was working hard to recruit a more international board.
ICANN’s authority, granted by the U.S. government in 1998, formally covers the Internet addressing system but extends to related trademark disputes and security of the Net’s core directories but, adds AP:
Because ICANN reports to the US Department of Commerce, “some countries are nervous that in a worst-case scenario, the US could force ICANN and its contractors to disrupt Internet traffic to entire countries by deleting them from central computers – like ripping out pages of a telephone directory.”
April 1st, 2004 at 3:46 pm
> Because ICANN reports to the US Department of
> Commerce, “some countries are nervous that in a worst-case
> scenario, the US could force ICANN and its contractors to disrupt
> Internet traffic to entire countries by deleting them from central > computers – like ripping out pages of a telephone directory.”
Given this scenario, can we not shift to a distributed directory, more like a p2p network, where you might not know of every node in existence, but your node will know the nodes, it has dealt with, and then the nodes they have dealt with, etc… essentially creating a dynamic directory local to the individual nodes, updated in real time.
This strike me as a more robust and failure resistant solution, in the event that some “disaster” takes down links to the core dirctory, or even removes those servers completely.
- The_Solecist